Oman Sail’s teams take top spots in Extreme Sailing

TRIBUNE NEWS NETWORK DOHA

FOUR race wins on the final day were enough to secure Pierre Pennec’s crew on Groupe Edmond de Rothschild a victory at the Extreme Sailing Series in Nice, France, for a second year in a row.

The bigger picture remained highly positive for Oman Sail’s Extreme 40 teams with The Wave, Muscat coming home second and Oman Air third, pushing them to overall first and second, respectively, in the 2012 season championship going into the final and deciding event in Rio de Janeiro on December 6 to 9
Another day of mixed conditions in Act 7 on the Cote d’Azur’s Baie des Anges, saw The Wave, Muscat struggle early on and after two races on Monday, their teammates and chief rivals on Oman Air had taken second place off them.

“It was a pretty tough day, quite windy,” said The Wave Muscat’s Hashim al Rashdi.

“The final race was quite nervous, because it was so tight on points.” In fact going into the last race, The Wave, Muscat still had the opportunity to win the regatta but after a difficult start and with Groupe Edmond de Rothschild leading, this was not to be.

The Wave, Muscat now goes into the final event of the season with a 7.5 point lead over second placed Oman Air.

With Rio counting 1.5 points per position, this means that if Oman Air wins and The Wave, Muscat is sixth, the overall championship will go to Morgan Larson’s team.

Either way, in Rio there is currently a strong chance that The Wave, Muscat and Oman Air can better the result of Chris Draper and Loïck Peyron’s Oman Sail teams in 2009 when they finished first and third respectively. “1-2 - it won’t be easy,” predicts Rashdi. “I have a lot of respect for the other teams and everyone has been competing really hard this season. We need to keep training and be as focused as we have been throughout the year and, inshallah, we get to bring victory back to Oman this year.” If this does comes to pass then Rashdi says that he personally will owe a great deal to his predecessor on board The Wave, Muscat, Khamis al Anbouri. “At the beginning of the year Khamis coached me and I was training with him last year. I am very proud to be able to step into Khamis’ shoes, because he is one of the best sailors in Oman. I promised Khamis to do the best I can. If we win, I will bring the Cup home for him.” The Wave, Muscat skipper Leigh McMillan was realistic about their prospects for winning the 2012 Extreme Sailing Series. “We can’t take our eye off our goal of winning the overall series. To do that we must just try to beat the boat in second and keep extending our lead at every event and that is what we have managed to do so far. But there are still a lot of points to go and we need to be absolutely fired up in Rio to make sure we can pull it out of the bag and win.”

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